ALMA and the Event Horizon Telescope: Moving Towards a Close-Up of a Black Hole and its Jets

Credit: Chalmers/J. Bournonville/Anne-Kathrin Baczko

After taking the first images of black holes, the ground-breaking Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is poised to reveal how black holes launch powerful jets into space. An international research team has shown that the EHT will be able to make exciting images of a supermassive black hole and its jets in the galaxy NGC 1052. The measurements, made with interconnected radio telescopes, also confirm strong magnetic fields close to the black hole’s edge.

“The centre of this galaxy, NGC 1052, is a promising target for imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, but it’s faint, complex and more challenging than all other sources we’ve attempted so far”, says Anne-Kathrin Baczko, an astronomer at Onsala Space Observatory, Chalmers and the lead of this research.

The team made measurements using just five of the telescopes in the EHT’s global network – including ALMA, including ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a partner, in a configuration that would allow the best possible estimate of its potential for future observations, and supplemented with measurements from other telescopes.

“For such a faint and unknown target, we were not sure if we would get any data at all. But the strategy worked, thanks in particular to the sensitivity of ALMA and complementary data from many other telescopes”, says Anne-Kathrin Baczko.

This text was adapted from a press release shared by Chalmers University. View the full release.

This news article was originally published on the NRAO website on December 17, 2024.